The changing face of America / Immigrants are big factor as nation nears 300 million

Ilene Lelchuk, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published
4:00 am PDT, Sunday, October 15, 2006

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Harold Furst of El Cerrito, with his wife Alice Furst, 74, (right) is planning to make his 90th birthday on November 24 of this year. Photo taken on 10/11/06.
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Harold Furst of El Cerrito, with his wife Alice Furst, 74, (right) is planning to make his 90th birthday on November 24 of this year. Photo taken on 10/11/06.
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Harold Furst of El Cerrito, with his wife Alice Furst, 74, (right) is planning to make his 90th birthday on November 24 of this year. Photo taken on 10/11/06.
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Harold Furst of El Cerrito, with his wife Alice Furst, 74, (right) is planning to make his 90th birthday on November 24 of this year. Photo taken on 10/11/06.
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The changing face of America / Immigrants are big factor as nation nears 300 million

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The 300 millionth American is expected to arrive this week, but in a break with tradition, that landmark resident won't necessarily be a newborn.

She or he may be an adult immigrant.

All the U.S. Census Bureau knows for sure is that a baby is born somewhere in the country every 7 seconds, a new immigrant arrives every 31 seconds on average and someone dies every 13 seconds, for a net average gain of one resident every 11 seconds.

Based on those averages, the Census Bureau projects that we'll hit 300 million at 4:46 a.m. Pacific time Tuesday. The bureau's population clock, ticking away in cyberspace at www.census.gov, put the U.S. population at 299,982,501 at 10 p.m. PDT Saturday.

A lot has changed since 1967, the year that America hit the 200 million mark. At that point, foreign-born residents made up just 5 percent of the population. By 2004, with the advent of legal reforms in 1965 that revived immigration, that figure had jumped to 12 percent.

Immigrant growth

Put another way, immigrants and their children and grandchildren have accounted for more than half of the population increase in the United States since 1967, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

"We are returning to our melting pot roots," said William Frey, a demographer for the Brookings Institution.

Immigrants accounted for 15 percent of Americans in 1915, when the nation's population hit the 100 million mark. The largest group was Germans, and rising anti-immigration sentiment led Congress to adopt immigration controls in the 1920s and 1930s.

These days, there is a new wave of anti-immigration sentiment. With newcomers of color spilling into Middle America for the first time, hundreds of bills are being addressed in legislatures across the country, and Congress has proposed fencing off more than a third of the U.S.-Mexico border.

But today's fights over immigrants, especially those here illegally, don't compare with the intense fear and hatred at the dawn of the 20th century, said Mike Hout, a sociology professor at UC Berkeley.

"Look at Columbus Day in 1900, when the first really big parade was organized in New York," Hout said. "Two days prior, the state Assembly passed a bill prohibiting hiring alien Italians for state contracts. The New York Times quoted a socialite saying she was employing Italians in her gardens, but she'd now fire them as her patriotic duty.

"For the march, 30,000 Italians and Italian Americans congregated ... and two blocks later they were greeted with a shower of bricks from Irish workers on a local construction site protesting Italians taking their jobs. Cops broke up the march with billy clubs."

A century later, New York's 2000 Columbus Day parade was led by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, grandson of Italian immigrants, who was followed by a Chinese dragon and floats representing numerous other ethnic groups.

Across the country, as well as in California, the largest single immigrant group is from Mexico -- about 30 percent of foreign-born people living in the United States.

Overpopulation fears

Immigration is an issue, first because it is driving about half the country's population growth, but this week's milestone also rings alarms for people concerned about climate change, rising energy consumption, farmland disappearing to development and the sheer amount of trash 300 million people will generate.

The news in 1967 that the country's population had hit 200 million spurred Stanford biology Professor Paul Ehrlich, author of the "Population Bomb" in 1968, to found the group Zero Population Growth with a Connecticut lawyer and a Yale forestry professor. Now called Population Connection, the group advocates curbing illegal immigration, making birth control readily available, and using foreign aid to improve life in other countries.

"People come to this country because they want the American dream. The question is what can we do to make the Mexican dream better or the Guatemalan dream ... so the decision people make about where they live is not made by poverty or terror," said John Seager, Population Connection president.

Ehrlich, whose book foretold mass famine and economic catastrophe for the last fourth of the 20th century, says the nation's optimal population is about 100 million. And he says his sad predictions were too optimistic, though many didn't come true.

He knew in 1968 about possible global warming or cooling, but not which way the environment was headed. He also didn't know about ozone depletion or how fast tropical forests and species were disappearing. And, he said, he knew that population growth increased the chance that diseases might transfer from animals to humans, but he hadn't imagined AIDS or avian flu.

"All these things are tied in together with population, but people still don't pay attention," Ehrlich said.

Someone must have listened. The average American household is at an all-time low of 2.6 people, compared with 3.3 in 1967 and 4.5 in 1915.

Though its population ranks third behind China's 1.3 billion and India's 1.1 billion, the United States is among the world's least densely populated countries. And it is growing much more slowly than the world's fourth most populous country, Indonesia, which has 232 million residents and occupies one-fifth as much land as the United States. Since the 1960s, Indonesia has doubled in population, China has almost doubled, and India has more than doubled, while the United States increased by half.

"India and China may be more dense, but they don't come close to us in per-capita consumption," Ehrlich said. "It's about what style you are going to live in."

Changes over the years

What the approaching population landmark means depends most of all on your perspective. Bay Area residents born during the other milestone eras waxed nostalgic about simpler times without Bay Bridge traffic jams and rampant school shootings.

In 1915, new homes cost $3,200, a Model T was $550, processed cheese first hit the market, and San Francisco hosted the Panama-Pacific International Exposition near where the Golden Gate Bridge had yet to be built.

"The biggest change during my life has been the worship of money," said Harold Furst of El Cerrito, born in 1916 and a retired professor, banker and executive. "Everything you do now is to get money. Legal or illegal, it's all right, and we do not look down on it."

Furst lost both his parents to the influenza epidemic when he was a year old. When he was 11, the family and friends who had cared for him left him on his own in the Los Angeles area, where he worked odd jobs for 10 or 15 cents an hour to pay the $15 monthly rent on a single room. Later, he paid $100 for his first vehicle, a 1922 Chevrolet touring car without glass windows.

Furst also put himself through UC Berkeley, which cost about $200 a year at the time, and he bought his first house for $4,000, in Lafayette.

The only way Andy Graham, born in 1967, could afford a house in the Bay Area was to partner with a stranger and create a tenancy-in-common. He paid $230,000 in 2000 for his 1,100-square-foot portion of the property he shares in Sebastopol.

The year he was born, the median price of a new house was $24,600, gas cost 33 cents a gallon, the first heart transplant was performed, and the first Super Bowl was played.

Members of Graham's generation, many now raising children of their own, remarked that childhood today is crammed much tighter with pressures and, well, stuff.

"Kids have always been marketed to, but now it's so blatant. I see it with girls and fashion and boys with video games," said Graham, whose girlfriend has three teenagers. "It seems like everything moves so much faster. Like in schools, the standardized testing is pushing them a lot harder. I feel like I breezed through school."

Today's world

Babies and immigrants arriving this fall will live in a country where the median-price American home costs $290,600, gas is $2.25 a gallon, and a $115 billion company called Google gobbled another Internet business for $1.65 billion.

Expectant San Francisco moms with babies due this week said they worry about the future.

"There are so many things that you feel you have to do and have," Alicia Griffith said.

Friends are advising her to apply to preschool while the child is still in utero, then get into the best private elementary school and sign up for language-immersion classes.

"It's a different world," she said, specifically mentioning the Oct. 2 shooting of 10 schoolgirls in rural Pennsylvania. "I didn't think twice about it when I went to high school, about whether I was safe or not."

Naomi Mahoney, also due to give birth this week, is concerned about the environment.

"Will San Francisco even be here or under the sea because the ice caps are melting?" she asked.

Both moms, though, said they try not to worry all the time. Their children will be 37 when America hits 400 million, according to census estimates.

"We've decided to live one day at a time," Griffith said.

A new milestone for U.S. population

The number of residents has tripled since 1915 - and much has changed.

U.S. population, in hundreds of millions

1915: 100,000,000

1967: 200,000,000

2006: 300,000,000

1915

President: Woodrow Wilson

Price of a new home: $3,200

Cost of a gallon of regular gas: 25¢

Cost of a first-class stamp: 2¢

Average household size: 4.5 people

Number of people age 65 and older: 4.5 milllion

Most popular baby names for boys and girls: John and Mary

1967

President: Lyndon B. Johnson

Price of a new home: $24,600

Cost of a gallon of regular gas: 33¢

Cost of a first-class stamp: 5¢

Average household size: 3.3 people

Number of people age 65 and older: 19.1 million

Most popular baby names for boys and girls: Michael and Lisa

2006

President: George W. Bush

Price of a new home: $290,600

Cost of a gallon of regular gas: $2.25

Cost of a first-class stamp: 39¢

Average household size: 2.6 people

Number of people age 65 and older: 36.8 million

Most popular baby names for boys and girls: Jacob and Emily

Bay Area population, 1900 - 2000

Population in millions

1900: 658,111

1990: 6,023,577

2000: 6,783,760

Combined population of the nine Bay Area counties: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma.